Sunshine and shadow play amid the trees
In bosky groves, while from the vivid sky
The sun’s gold arrows fleck the fields at noon,
Where weary cattle to their slumber hie.
How sweet the music of the purling rill,
Trickling adown the grassy hill!
While dreamy fancies come to give repose
When the first star of evening glows.
July, Henrietta Cordelia Ray
The Formalist on Bridget Hoffman.
Nicole Combeau: When we Surrender.
England vs Argentina (Messi), 1 – 2
[the] use [of] the structural productivity of ambivalence in order to make better forms of life
Would inhabiting this help us open better imaginaries for jolting the good life into being … ?
build something out of actively shared energy to feel more optimistic about the world
(LB)
Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences.
Ongoing, Jenny Xie
Juliana Halpert on LACMA (e-flux)
“The “synchronic museum,” as he calls its new alternative, “would forego history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial.””
Ne fais jamais de peinture si tu veux vivre tranquille.
Corot, to a friend
The most inviting landscape, where we say,
“Here we may rest and make this landscape ours,”
For him is apprehension. To convey
A moment of its meaning calls on powers
He sometimes doubts possessing. In his hand
The palette with its colored spots and smears
Seems to match nothing. On the easel’s bland
And vacant canvas not a line appears
To guide him. While we gaze and shift our eyes
Accumulating all there is to see,
His fuller sight begins to realize
A world brought into being anxiously,
Where structured shapes and contoured colors show
A calmer scene than any we could know.
Thomas Carper, The Tranquil Life
A creamy tear descended here when Cupid squeezed the teat
of Venus. Dripping down the Milky Way it puddled beneath
old oak, new pine. Love’s selfish thirst did pluck a cosmic note,
set every entombed entangled bit of me in roots both new
and old to singing. I was become in earth and by harmony
a million bits of tongue and ear, sound funnels upwhorled
in song conducting cones. Fresh music from old flesh
corrected my (most melancholy) record of this last go round
the planet. Now I was first things: elementals, vegetable
and mineral in form, dust to kick it on the breeze,
loam to feed old oak, new pine, Eros-greedy energy
on hunt for nourishment, cream to suck, breast to squeeze.
Orbit Music, Jennifer Moxley
Broken Promises in Cuban Miami, Ada Ferrer and Miriam Pensack (New York Review)
The LRB Podcast, Poetry and the Turning World: Divorce (Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘The Divorce’, Anne Carson’s The Beauty of a Husband , ‘The Mpemba Effect’, Isabelle Baafi)
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, Anne Carson.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats
The mosquito knows full well, small as he is
he’s a beast of prey.
But after all
he only takes his bellyful,
he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.
The Mosquito Knows, D. H. Lawrence
Norway – Brazil 2 -1.
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes
Jacob Lawrence
Could paint
The beauty
Of ?bareness
Blacks
Moved North
Leaving
Empty
Rooms
Behind
Them
Lawrence’s genius
Was to paint
Those rooms
Left behind
Brown bare
Wooden rooms
Light brown plank walls
Dark brown plank floors
A single dark green
Shade
Covering
The window
Erasing the lush landscape
Creating a
Stark beauty
A simple beauty
A bare beauty
The Beauty of Bareness, William J. Harris
exhibition has been put together by the team behind the DRAW Project. Based on a proposal by Rafael Domenech, Sonia Rosa Kahn, Loïc Le Gall, Alejandro Valencia. This exhibition is supported by 193 Gallery, Paris. July 3 — October 17 2026.
Pleasure is paramount for literary theorist Northrop Frye’s definition of romance, as wish fulfillment: “[T]he quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality.”
the pleasures of genre and romance are the smooth operators of recurrence and relief, certainty. So unlike life, this smoothness swoons on the weft for expectations and the warp of their fulfillment, pleasure with insurance.
We repeat aesthetic pleasure, we repeat as aesthetic pleasure, because repetition is a—the—truth of psychic life.
Love’s Work, Anna Kornbluh (Parapraxis)